“Boardwalk Empire” thoughts, Season Three, Episode Eight: “The Pony”

Last week’s Boardwalk Empire today! Sorry for the delay — I had a house full of hurricane refugees and time was short.

* Nice to know that you can have half a face and no ability to modulate the pitch of your voice and you can still say something like “Jimmy deserved better than this” and make it crystal clear what you really mean.

* Hey, Hymie Weiss is being played by Meadow Soprano’s fiancé Finn!

* Poor Van Alden, with that whiskey still pumping away amid his kids. That guy is like this weird swiffer cloth, attracting venality and corruption to him wherever he goes.

* Lotta laugh lines in this one:

Nucky’s man Friday: I am so sorry for your loss.
Nucky: Don’t be an idiot.

Nucky: That’s all you’re gonna give me?
Means: Rather more than you came in with.

And of course Esther’s line about running naked through the pages of the United States Criminal Code for fun.

* My notes for this ep, which all my notes for this show are starting to resemble, are basically a series of OMGs. “Jeeeeeesus that club Mellon’s in.” “Sheesh, that low-angle shot of Gillian pouring Nucky a drink.” “Gyp and Richard. Hoo boy.” “That fucking shot of Chicago.” A series of exciting things to see and think about.

* Margaret’s DTF.

* Capone puts on his hat realizing he’s the boss now, right? He is a weirdly lovable figure on this show.

* No question whatsoever that that asshole at the iron company was getting an iron in the face. You really have to admire how far the show went into the absurd with that whole sequence. They’re really making very little effort to either make Van Alden less of a mutant or to tie him into the prevailing tone of the rest of the show.

* The Billie situation was easy enough to see coming, particularly when we start getting her “just a small-town girl, livin’ in a lonely world” backstory. Ah well. Goodbye, Nadine Beckenbauer.

This entry was posted
on Sunday, November 11th, 2012 at 10:29 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Good episode, but it must be said the show is rarely surprising, both due to obvious, lugubriously paced story arcs and plenty of moments of extreme violence that establish that anyone who isn’t a famous, real person is going to probably end badly. Van Alden is a good example. He’s like the Trashcan Man at this point, so badly wired that any decision he makes is the wrong one. I see the end of this series as him killing Nucky, because otherwise why is he even still on the show?

When writers introduce some previously unseen part of someone’s life, it’s usually to make a point or to symbolize something. Clearly, “The Pony” is about supposed to be important, but all I can see is that Margaret and Billie were Nucky’s ponies that he nursed until they were ready to run on their own, and y’know, who needs that? It didn’t add any gravity to the situation. Billie’s seeming good fortune and new hair were obvious ironic misdirections, and Margaret banging Irish Spring (with her new IUD?) isn’t meaningful or sexy.

Agree on Capone. Is Weiss Capone’s boss? With him and Shannon, Boardwalk has locked up two of the finest walleyed actors working.

Everything I Do

Hi! My name is Sean T. Collins and I am a writer. Here are links to basically every place on the internet where you can find what I do. A site for everything and everything on its site, that’s my motto. Non-tumblrs up top, tumblrs down below.

All Leather Must Be Boiled: News and views on George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and its television adaptation Game of Thrones, located at boiledleather.com. Home of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour podcast, co-hosted by Stefan Sasse. Of all my tumblrs this is where you’ll find the widest range of posts, as I often rope in pretty much anything I’m thinking and writing about television, fiction, fantasy, genre storytelling, politics, whatever. Beneath the gold, the bitter steel.

The True Black: Comics written by me and drawn by a host of talented collaborators. Also contains news of upcoming comics projects.

Bowie Loves Beyoncé: You can’t say no to the beauty and the beast, darling. Images of two of the best human beings and popular musicians, David Bowie and Beyoncé Knowles-Carter. This was my first tumblr, so it’s what shows up when I like your posts.

Fuck Yeah, T-Shirts: No man with a good t-shirt needs to be justified. Good pictures of our greatest garment.

Superheroes Lose: Superhero publishers love putting pictures of their superheroes losing on the covers of their comics. I love putting them on this tumblr. When we imagine people who can do anything, this is what we imagine.

Badge: Stories of police brutality, overkill, and overreach in the United States of America, reblogged from around the internet with minimal comment. Before they bring the curtain down.

The Deep Ones: There’s something in the water. Sea monsters real, extinct, and imaginary. Co-founded and co-curated by me and Julia Gfrörer.

The Devil in Love: A man of wealth and taste. Images of the infernal with undeniable aesthetic and/or erotic appeal. Founded by Julia, co-curated by me.

Homage to Catalonia: Images of churches on fire or in ruins as a means by which to contemplate the positive and negative energy generated by the buildings and realized in the flames. Founded by me, co-curated by Julia.

Comics Democracy: Comics with over 10,000 notes on tumblr, found while tumbling and reblogged without comment. I will show you a world without gatekeepers.

Cool Practice: What I wanted to be and how I wanted to be it, one song at a time. Thoughts on music and its intersection with “coolness.”

Sean T. Collins on Comics: A repository for writing about comics (mostly comics on the web, mostly alternative-genre comics at that) for my former day job, this tumblr will also sometimes reblog writing-about-comics I’ve done elsewhere.

Sean T. Collins on Culture: The twin of seantcomics, this tumblr houses my old dayjob writing on genre culture that influenced me as a kid. Who knows what I’ll get up to with it eventually?

The Boiled Leather Audio Hour: A dedicated tumblr for my ASoIaF/GoT podcast, created for iTunes syndication purposes, but hey, you can follow it if you want.

In addition, I created several one-off tumblrs to host individual webcomics written by me and drawn by other people. I plan to reblog all of them to The True Black eventually, but here they are in their native habitats: